After two years of stonewalling, NASA GISS FOIA files are now online

In August 2007, I submitted two Freedom of Information Act requests to NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), headed by long-time Gore advisor James Hansen and his right-hand man Gavin Schmidt (and RealClimate.org co-founder).

I did this because Canadian businessman Steve McIntyre — a man with professional experience investigating suspect statistical claims in the mining industry and elsewhere, including his exposure of the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph — noticed something unusual with NASA’s claims of an ever-warming first decade of this century. NASA appeared to have inflated its U.S. temperatures beginning in the year 2000. My FOIA request asked NASA about their internal discussions regarding whether and how to correct the temperature error caught by McIntyre.

NASA stonewalled my request for more than two years, until Climategate prompted me to offer notice of intent to sue if NASA did not comply immediately.

On New Year’s Eve, NASA finally provided the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) with the documents I requested in August 2007.

…

Regarding U.S. temperatures, Ruedy confessed to Hansen on August 23, 2007 to say:

I got a copy from a journalist in Brazil, we don’t save the data.

——————————————–

The Ruedy relationship with a Brazilian journalist raises the matter of the incestuous relationship between NASA’s GISS and like-minded environmental reporters. One can’t help but recall how, recently, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim of glacier shrinkage in the Himalayas was discredited when found to be the work of a single speculative journalist at a popular magazine, and not strict peer-reviewed scientific data. The emails we obtained include several instances of very close ties and sympathetic relationships with journalists covering them.

…

In an August 15, 2007, email from Ruedy to Brazilian journalist Leticia Francisco Sorg, responding to Sorg’s request for Ruedy to say if warming is accelerating, Ruedy replied:

“To observe that the warming accelerates would take even longer observation times” than the past 25 years. In fact, it would take “another 50-100 years.”

This is a damning admission that NASA has been complicit in UN alarmism. This is not science. It is debunked advocacy. The impropriety of such policy advocacy, let alone allowing unsubstantial scientific claims to become part of a media campaign, is self-evident.

In August 2007, Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) submitted two Freedom of Information Act requests to NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), headed by long-time Gore advisor James Hansen and his right-hand man Gavin Schmidt (and RealClimate.org co-founder).

Canadian businessman Steve McIntyre — a man with professional experience investigating suspect statistical claims in the mining industry and elsewhere, including his exposure of the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph — noticed something unusual with NASA’s claims of an ever-warming first decade of this century. NASA appeared to have inflated its U.S. temperatures beginning in the year 2000.

The FOIA request asked NASA about their internal discussions regarding whether and how to correct the temperature error caught by McIntyre.

And you see Andrew Revkin’s attempt at being objective, when he admits his amazement after digesting surfacestations.org., further thanks to the WUWT resident bulldog that bears this blog!
Keep on folks…their wall is tumbling. There is no weapon like the truth.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Well done Steve but so XXXXX what the climate goes up and down….
hopefully this will die away because it certainly is taking us all a lot of our precious time wasted. I hope both warmistas and deniers realize this LOL

“jorgekafkazar (20:42:22) :
The real question is: “How much longer can the main stream media continue to participate in the cover-up?””
Just long enough for the “fix” to be installed, up and running and starting to channel money to the ruling elite.

Can anyone tell me how this set of NASA email correspondence is different from the set of NASA emails obtained by Judicial Watch, which have been explored by Steve McIntyre and others at ClimateAudit, WUWT and elsewhere?

So, does any of this data pertain to the raw temperature station data? If so, I’d be interested if any of it has been adjusted from the original readings.
BTW Anthony, I heard you yesterday on KFI and you were great. I wish you were on for an hour instead of a half hour.

Thanks, Chris, Steve, Anthony et al for keeping the hot spotlight of public attention focused on the Climategate scandal and its roots in the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and all the federal research agencies that NAS controls by virtue of budget review – NASA, DOE, etc.
There is still a lot of filth to be revealed, including the blatantly false information that NASA and DOE have promoted on the origin, chemical composition, and source of nuclear energy for the Sun – Earth’s ultimate source of heat.http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/astro-ph/0411255http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0410460
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space Sciences
Former NASA PI for Apollo

Robert (21:08:30) :
Uh huh….and science does INDEED go on.
But its indiscretions not without notice from a few sharp attorneys.
The good thing is…is that a really good scientist….and a really REALLY good attorney….[OK….not all attorneys, LOL] are about the same thing: the TRUTH.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Thank you Chris Horner; It is clearer and clearer that this is a “robust” conspirisy of all 3 of the data base providers. There is no way that all of the operations are equally sloppy or incompitant. Oh yes, and they all lost the data? This is not climate science, this is a climate con.

Seeing Oliver’s comment reminds me that NASA have enough budget to (just recently) launch SDO, but they seemingly don’t have enough for space to store temp data?
I’m sure Oliver will be taking great interest in what data comes back from SDO 🙂

jorgekafkazar (20:42:22) : media?
Do you mean the national TV networks? In the USA?
The Wall Street Journal is covering “climate news”
almost every day with articles and opinion pieces.
These also appear on their web issue.
The WSJ isn’t MTV or CBS but it is an important
outlet for serious news in the US.
Today (Wed. Front page) they had a story of the
pull out of BP, ConocoPhillips, and Caterpillar
from the Climate Action Partnership.
I think it is fair to say the answer to your
question is that some parts of the media
are now in the uncover mode.

Not much of a “smoking gun” so far. All I see is a bunch of bureaucrats bungling a data base, probably with a bias toward that which rewards the institution. Why would anyone be surprised at that? Put some serious government funding on “global cooling” and those boys and girls will respond accordingly. The only mystery to me is why anyone should expect anything different from any organization with “funding sensitivities”, governmental or otherwise. Even the lucrative private consulting profession knows you can’t make a living telling them what they don’t want to hear.
Truth is an elusive butterfly that, fortunately for us all, has a life of its own.

Joanna Nova noted last week that the “dam wall” has been breached. This new scandal, with further FOI revelations in the pipeline, surely signals a full scale flood!
Having been an avid reader of WUWT since the early days, when any kind of scepticism was viewed with the same degree of scorn as being an advocate of DUI, I can only say that messrs Watts, MacIntyre, Monckton and a few others no doubt, deserve to be handed the nobel prize so erroneously awarded to the Goracle and his grant-grabbing accolytes.
It amazes me how quickly the mainstream media – at least in the UK and now, at last, here in Australia to some degree – have claimed the “Climategate / glaciergate” etc “scoops” as their own!
The truth is that blogs such as this, the excellent Andrew Bolt, SPPI, CA, jeff Id, Joanna Nova, Bishop Hill and the many others so many of us frequent, are actually a vanguard of a whole new source of information….free from the institutional “we know better” bias of the mainstream media, opinionated, searching, libertarian and downright dissident!!!
The fact that the mainstream media are now desperately playing “catch-up” is proof that the anarchic democracy of the weblog is now much more relevant than they are, and that they ignore it at their peril!
It’s a privilege to have been a spectator through such a momentous period in the history of science, the media and freedom of information……and I’m going to enjoy every second of the “endgame”!

““To observe that the warming accelerates would take even longer observation times” than the past 25 years. In fact, it would take “another 50-100 years.””
How is that statement alarmist or advocacy? Somebody asked if warming was accelerating, and he replied, no, you’d have to wait several more decades before you could observe acceleration. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how Horner is interpreting that statement to see alarmism or advocacy.

The sticking parts, as I see it, are the 50-100 years to see the trend confirmed, the .5C/.9F error margin, and the fact that it is regions which count. These regions have real people in them, and the climate history is very important to us. When the globe changes .7C , your region changes 3C and the next one changes -3C, it’s everything.
There’s a lot of attitude in those emails reminiscent of others we’ve seen.
I didn’t get the feeling that they were being scientists, but more like keepers of secrets, and expressing revulsion that thier assertions about climate were being challenged.
Advocacy? Yes.
The Red Herring is the assumption that if the whole globe changes by .7C, all regions will act in unison. Ain’t the way it works.

How much longer can they keep up the pretense that AGW is valid? I’d say approximately – forever, because AGW is not a science, it’s a religion. And religions aren’t upset by mere facts. For example: lack of snow proves AGW, just as too much snow does, lack of hurricanes proves AGW, just as too many hurricanes do, and lack of fog proves AGW, just as to much Fog does. It’s simply, whatever happens is proof enough for the pure of heart.

Robert, 21:08
“So . . . not data.
Not models.
E-mails of internal discussions, hoping to find something embarrassing.
Good luck with your witch hunt. Meanwhile, science goes on.”
What a pathetic statement. Your data has been distorted and machinized through adjustments that make no sense and then lost. The models are inaccurate and inappropriately made to reproduce a preconceived notion of AGW that can’t be found. What science are you talking about? Science is skeptical, yet you apparently think that a joke.
Please consult your diety for fresh instructions. These limpish statements about “science” going on only accrue to the continued discredit of your assertions, implied or expressed.
Now I understand why such folk are known here as trolls.

Yes, Dave N (21:29:14), I was delighted by the new attitude expressed in the news of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory: The ‘Variable Sun’ Missionhttp://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2010/05feb_sdo.htm
It includes these comments from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), NASA Headquarters, NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, and the University of Colorado.
1. From NASA Headquarters: “The sun,” explains Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters in Washington DC, “is a variable star.”
2. From NRL: “Understanding solar variability is crucial,” says space scientist Judith Lean of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC. “Our modern way of life depends upon it.”
3. From NAS: “According to a 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences, a century-class solar storm could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.”
4. From the Marshall Space Flight Center: “The depth of the solar minimum in 2008-2009 really took us by surprise,” says sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “It highlights how far we still have to go to successfully forecast solar activity.”
5. From Boulder, CO: “If human eyes could see EUV wavelengths, no one would doubt that the sun is a variable star,” says Tom Woods of the University of Colorado in Boulder.
6. From NRL: “‘Solar constant’ is an oxymoron,” says Judith Lean of the Naval Research Lab. “Satellite data show that the sun’s total irradiance rises and falls with the sunspot cycle by a significant amount.”
7. From NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center: “Understanding the inner workings of the solar dynamo has long been a ‘holy grail’ of solar physics,” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.
Now DOE (Department of Energy) scientists need to come clean and admit or deny that N-N repulsion is the energy source that powers the Sun and generates the cycles of solar magnetic activity that are empirically linked with changes in Earth’s climate.
May the climate scandal also encourage:
a.) Scientists at NAS, NASA, the Goddard and Marshall Space Flight Centers, and NRL to re-examine their obsolete dogma of a Hydrogen-filled Sun, and
b.) Scientists at DOE to review carefully two 2002 papers, one reporting that solar neutrinos oscillate away before traveling from the Sun to the Earth [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 (2002) 011301] and the other reporting that the neutron repulsion is the primary energy source for the Sun [Journal of Fusion Energy 19 (2002) 197-201]. http://www.springerlink.com/content/x1n87370x6685079/
With kind regards,
Oliver

As for “I got a copy from a journalist in Brazil, we don’t save the data.”:
If they just saved the GHCN and USHCN source files they used for each month, they could just recreate whichever calculation they ever did. Perhaps they should do that.

Oliver K. Manuel (21:11:10) :There is still a lot of filth to be revealed, including the blatantly false information that NASA and DOE have promoted on the origin, chemical composition, and source of nuclear energy for the Sun
The current knowledge of how the Sun works is the result of hard work by scientists all over the world. NASA, etc, has nothing to do with this. But since NASA did not renew your grant, perhaps it is not too surprising that you are disgruntled, but your are in good company with many others who also didn’t get funded [the result rate for proposals is less than 25%].

This does not look right.
Is peer-review supposed to anonymous both ways?
Taken from the document:http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/business/foia/GISS.html
417760main_part4.pdf
——————————————
—Forwarded Message—
11 June 2007 14:50:28 +0100
Dear Dr. Schmidt;
I have received three reviews of your paper “Attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect.” All three reviewers recommend that the paper be rejected”
…
From Reviewer #1
“My overall impression is that I am not reading a polished paper, but reading an early draft – an impression that certainly isn’t helped by the fact that one of the authors is acknowledged in the Acknowledgements..”
…
From Reviewer #2
“Making the argument that forcing and feedback mechanisms are inherently different, so not putting the feedbacks into Table 3 plays right into the nay-sayers hands”
——————————————
Say What!! “plays right into the nay-sayers hands”?
Who are the “nay-sayers”?
Is this what is passing for Peer-Reviewed Science?

They better start ‘finding’ the data.
When I asked someone if the data thier partner took was in a personal copy format, they got curious. When I told that person that the data was NOT in the official NCDC or other records, they got very worried. One assumes when decades worth of data have been turned in over the years, that data is stored carefully and preserved.
The person I contacted said this scared them. No matter which way our climate changes, without a history, one does not know what to expect.
Yes, it certainly is scary.
I had my try at getting missing records out of NCDC.
The experience was less than rewarding. Got passed down the line and ended up with a “What was it you wanted now?”.
Perhaps I was an amusing Red Herring to them.
There are many station sites in my area with huge holes in them.
How’s your area doing?

@Robert
“E-mails of internal discussions, hoping to find something embarrassing.
Good luck with your witch hunt. Meanwhile, science goes on.”
Not a witch hunt, but a legitimate public concern. The US government has pumped billions of taxpayer dollars into climate change research and the public has a right to know exactly how their hard earned money is being spent. The employees at NASA (and other US government agencies) are fully aware that their internal communications are subject to review by the public. Thus, there is no reason to expect to find anything “embarrassing” in those emails unless YOU know something about “the science” that the rest of us do not.

Oliver K. Manuel (22:11:26) :Yes, Dave N (21:29:14), I was delighted by the new attitude expressed in the news of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory: The ‘Variable Sun’ Mission
This is not a ‘new attitude’. Abbot showed a hundred years ago that the Sun was a variable star. And none of this has any bearing on your ideas, if anything SDO will provide solid refutation. We fully expect SDO to further confirm the very successful standard solar models and provide us with a detailed view of the flows of plasma inside the gaseous Hydrogen Sun to aid us in prediction of solar activity.

Subject: Re: Your Reply to: GISS Temperature Correction Problem?
From: Gavin Schmidt gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov
Date: 19 Feb 2008 14:38:47 -0500
To: rruedy@giss.nasa.gov
I had a look at the data, and this whole business seems to be related to the infilling of seasonal and annual means. There is no evidence for any step change in any of the individual months.
The only anomalous point (which matches nearby deltas) is for Set 2005. Given the large amount of missing data in lampasas this gets propagated to the annual (D-N) mean – I think – with a little more weight then in the nearby stations. The other factor might be that lampasas is overall cooling, if we use climatology to infill in recent years, that might give a warm bias. But I’m not sure on how the filling-in happens.
Gavin

Why was this provided as PDF images? To make it as hard as possible to study?
Has this data been corrected or changed since this time? What is the current data? Why isn’t it released in real time? I am a taxpayer, I PAID for it!

Knowing this may get snipped.
[Response: Perhaps you’d care to translate what I’ve been accused of? The worst seems to be that I know Jim Hansen and that other people I know have talked to Brazilian journalists. To both crimes I plead guilty. Indeed, I have even spoken to Brazilian journalists myself. There is nothing else there. – gavin]

rbateman (22:02:56) :
“The sticking parts, as I see it, are the 50-100 years to see the trend confirmed,”
The current trend is significant over the last 30 years, so it’s already confirmed. That statement is about observing acceleration beyond the current rate. It’d take a long while to discern any acceleration.
“When the globe changes .7C , your region changes 3C and the next one changes -3C, it’s everything.”
Sure, but how much of the earth is not showing a warming trend over the last 30 years? Parts of Antarctica, and parts of the south Pacific, maybe.
“The Red Herring is the assumption that if the whole globe changes by .7C, all regions will act in unison. ”
Who has ever made that assumption? Model results certainly do not predict uniform warming. But much of the surface has some sort of warming trend, nonetheless.
“They better start ‘finding’ the data.”
It isn’t the original station data they’re talking about. It’s the results of the GISS calculation for the US. Basically, they don’t archive old versions of a file like this, for the US. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
I didn’t realise they ever put up a table for the US, actually; I can’t find one now.

———
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: Your Reply to: GISS Temperature Correction Problem?]
From: Gavin Schmidt gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov
Date: 19 Feb 2008 16:30:18 -0500
To: rruedy@giss.nasa.gov
On Tue, 2008-02-19 at 16:10, Reto Ruedy wrote:
| If at least 2 of the 3 months of a season are known, the mean of those |
| months is the seasonal mean; after all seasonal means are found, the |
| annual means are derived from those seasonal means; If at least 3 of then |
| 4 seasons are known, their average is the annual mean |
| I think this is aperfectly legitimate to use in the urbal adjustment step |
agreed
| However, Jay also used it in an earlier step (where we combine station |
| data for the same location). In addition, it is used to create the |
| tables an annual mean plots in the “Station Data” section of our web |
| site, but those data are not used for anything. |
these are the ones that puzzle me a little. They aren’t the average of
the two months with data. Thus I think some use of climatology or recent
years must be used. Which program writes these out? I’ll have a look.
However, the annual data that comes from this is used in the figures that
Watts is so fond of.
| In these cases we deal with absolute temperatures, and the technique |
| obviously does not work well if the hottest or coldest season is |
| missing. I remember vaguely that we played with various ways of filling |
| in the missing data rather than ignoring them, but jay must have decided |
| that in the average, the result were not substantially better |
that might be worth writing up a bit more formally…
———-

Mr. Horner, Anthony & mods;
Nice beginning to the dissection of the NASA/GISS FOIA emails.
How do we know if these FOIA emails provided by NASA/GISS are all the relevant emails?
I need to spend a few nights trying to determine if there are holes in the email chains and if are inferences to other not included emails.
Hope part of your future analyses also looks at whether these emails comprise the whole set or not.
John

So we can make a year out of 3 months!
——
On Wed, 200802020 at 13:49, Reto Ruedy wrote:
| Gavin
| You are right, I totally misrepresented what jay’s programs are doing
|
| It seems to me now that he computes a monthly climatology (based on all
| available months – not totally sure about that – as long as there is at
| least one month present), from that a season climatology, and from
| that finally an annual mean value.
|
| Then he finds the monthly anomaly series, from it a seasonal anomaly
| series (if at least 2 monthly anomalies were available), and from that
| an annual anomaly series (if at least 3 seasons were present).
|
| Adding anomaly and climatology, he got the final seasonal/annual series.

Henry (23:25:53) :
“The FOIA request was for the data, they released as emails”
The FOI was for emails relevant to the Y2K bug. It’s even at the top of the page.
All the data used by GISS is publicly available. GISS does not collect it themselves; they get it from NOAA, SCAR and Hadley. You can download all those files yourself.

Climategate 2.0 is beginning to look more and more like Gavingate 1.0.
No wonder Gavin quickly posted his “Whatevergate” article on RC in a desperate last-ditch attempt to defuse the situation using a tired valley girl euphemism.

Czechgate: Climate scientists dump world’s second oldest ‘cold’ climate recordhttp://www.sott.net/articles/show/203117-Czechgate-Climate-scientists-dump-world-s-second-oldest-cold-climate-record
February 16, 2010
John O’Sullivan
The latest independent analysis of world climate data by acclaimed skeptic blogger ‘Chiefio’ (aka E. M. Smith) and his blog contributors confirm that the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) has cynically dumped the world’s second oldest and reliable climate record at Prague in the Czech Republic for no scientific reason.
Climate skeptics claim the censoring of the Czech’s raw data has been perpetrated by climate scientists because the Prague records prove there has been no warming in Europe for over two hundred years.
Bloggers found that GHCN, based at Arizona State University, also cut out Prague’s warm 1940’s as it would make recent warming look unexceptional. This process of adjusting raw data by climatologists (almost always upwards) is known as ‘homogenization.’ Skeptics then found that climatologists had replaced the original Prague dataset from 1949 with a homogenized warmer series from another weather station in Praha/Ruzyne even though Prague had never stopped taking temperature readings.
Skeptic analysts are outraged because, after the Central England Temperature Record, the Czech records are the second oldest continous and reliable temperature record in the world and are known as the Central European Temperature Record. The data set has been kept uninterrupted since 1775 in Praha-Klementinum (Prague). Reading the Czech data we see that for the past 200 years the temperature in this part of central Europe has warmed by a statistically insignificant 0.25° Centigrade per century.
The Prague raw temperatures correlate perfectly with those of the world’s oldest climate data set, found in the Central England Temperature Record (CET) that has been running continuously for 351 years.
Thus, the two oldest and most reliable raw thermometer records in the world are telling us there is not a shred of real world evidence to show any significant global warming. Rather, it the homogenized or faked data created artificially by climatologists in their laboratories that is consistently being shown as the source of such ‘warming.’
***************************************************************************
Is it any wonder the CRU/NASA team hs hidden (or “lost”) so much raw data and fought so hard to keep it secret?
With “adjustments” they changed a 1.18ºC cooling to a 1.01ºC warming for the last 130 years. While they’re screaming about a supposedly scary global rise of 0.6ºC (sometimes said to be 0.7ºC or 0.8ºC) in the last 100 years they “adjust” this location upward by three times as much or more. As always, “adjustments” go only one way.

Policyguy (22:08:11) : (to Robert, 21:08) Now I understand why such folk are known here as trolls.
Thanks for that post, Policyguy; I have been trying to figure some way to say all that to Robert on a couple of threads now, but couldn’t get it right. You have.

Lucy Skywalker (23:57:36) :
It does not look look like it is all at the Neutralpedia link.
Are the emails in order there?
If they are in numeric-date order he last emil at that site was sent:
(NASA FOIA Email 70)
Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2007 12:02:10 -0500
The last email in the last of the four pdfs (417760main_part4.pdf) was sent
Date: 14 Oct 2009 18:21:07 -0400
Is there another page?

Hello;
When Gavin Schmidt say something like this:
“The other factor might be that lampasas is overall cooling, if we use climatology to infill in recent years, that might give a warm bias. ”
Is this type of statement ‘significant’?
PS.
It makes me think that ‘climatology’ as some kind of spice to warm up a meal,
or a trick for adding a warm bias to data?
Am I mistaken?

So Gavin Schmidt ‘assumes’ much and he is ‘pretty sure’ of a ‘fluke’ when calculating an annual temperature using only 7 months.
Seriously, is this normal?
Do all of you climate people work like this?
—-
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: Your Reply to: GISS Temperature Correction Problem?]
From: Gavin Schmidt
Date: 20 Feb 2008 15:01:26 -0500
To: rruedy
That works.
That implies that the missing months are assumed to have the same mean anomaly as the other two months, and that the missing seasons are assumed to have the same mean anomaly as the seasons present. Hence, one strong anomaly in a couple of months (ie. Sept and Nov 2005) can have a large impact on the annual mean.
I’m pretty sure that the Lampasas spike is just a fluke of the annual average construction. There are only eight months – of which only 7 are used to calculate the annual mean. The missing month (May) has the smallest anomaly, and so including it would bring down the annual mean by about 0.4 deg C.
There may be some improvements that could be made here. i.e. annual means could use as many months as there are available (rather than just whether the seasons are available), and it should be made clearer that this is a Dec-Nov mean, not the calendar year mean, Somewhere it should also be stated that the seas/ann values in the printout and figures are not used in the gridded data.
Thanks
Gavin

Mike McMillan (00:02:57) :
Re: the GISS foia pdf files –
I note without comment that the emails were first printed, then scanned, apparently manually judging by their occasional misalignment. This makes the pdf’s non-searchable.
Maybe someone needs to run the images past some Optical Character Recognition software.
It’s annoying that the FOI legislation doesn’t stipulate that material be provided in a sensible format. Clearly, it would have been easier for NASA to simply paste the text of the emails into whichever document format they want to use, so they are just being bloody minded in trying to obstruct the disclosure and assessment process.
But that’s OK, we won’t forget.

Ah, I see Lucy is one step ahead of me as usual.
Lucy Skywalker (23:57:36) :
These emails have been out for a little while. They are on Neutralpedia, having been put back into text files with OCR.http://www.neutralpedia.com/wiki/NASA_FOIA_Emails

””””Policyguy (22:08:11) : (to Robert, 21:08) Now I understand why such folk are known here as trolls.””’
””””Roger Carr (00:23:10) : Thanks for that post, Policyguy; I have been trying to figure some way to say all that to Robert on a couple of threads now, but couldn’t get it right. You have.”””’
Policyguy/Roger,
Regarding troll phenomena, is it the intent-to-troll or the actual acts-of-trolling that you find to be the most entertaining aspect?
I would go with intent-to-troll as the most entertaining aspect. The actual acts-of-trolling are a very difficult art form that most trolls don’t pull off well, so usually disappointing.
John

carrot eater (21:47:10) :
““To observe that the warming accelerates would take even longer observation times” than the past 25 years. In fact, it would take “another 50-100 years.””
How is that statement alarmist or advocacy? Somebody asked if warming was accelerating, and he replied, no, you’d have to wait several more decades before you could observe acceleration. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how Horner is interpreting that statement to see alarmism or advocacy
I think the point is that that particular statement, was neither alarmist nor advocacy, yet NASA on the whole at the time of such a statement was at the forefront of alarmist AGW, lending more than a little hypocracy to the point being made! Horner is vindicated!
AND back to the Sun again, deja vu. If we don’t know what full effect element ‘A’ (the Sun) has on element ‘B’ (the Earth), how the friggin heck can anybody claim with any degree of certainty, that element ‘C’ (GHGs) overpowers element ‘A’? By their own damming admission, UNIPCC TAR 2001 SPM, Solar forcing, “VERY low level of scientific understanding”, to UNIPCC AR4 2007 SPM, Solar forcing, “low level of scientific understanding”, apparently gives enough confidence to halve its contribution to climate????? WOW! How does anyone know that the dropping of VERY wasn’t just another little “trick of the trade” in IPCC reporting? Had the scientific understanding of the Sun improved that much over 6 years, yet they didn’t even get the Solar Cycle 24 start & intensity close? Impressive me thinks – not! They remind me of the “end of the world” brigade, so that when the “end of the world” doesn’t happen, they come up with an excuse as to why their calculations went wrong & set a new date for it, therefore always being right!

John Whitman (01:19:13) : I would go with intent-to-troll as the most entertaining aspect. The actual acts-of-trolling are a very difficult art form that most trolls don’t pull off well, so usually disappointing.
Sweet, John!

@tallbloke
“Ah, I see Lucy is one step ahead of me as usual.”
This doesn’t seem to be the case. I just checked the neutralpedia site and I cannot find any of the emails from the 4th PDF file in the series. The 4th PDF file is ginormous (nearly 5 times as large as the other 3 PDF’s combined) and is loaded with interesting emails.
You can verify that these are not in neutralpedia because the 4th PDF has emails from 2009 and these do not show up in a simple search on the neutralpedia web site:http://www.neutralpedia.com/w/index.php?search=NASA+2009
The search terms “NASA” and “2009” only returns 8 records and they all come from the Climategate CRU zip, not the latest NASA 4th PDF file.

I just finished cranking all 618 pages of the 4th PDF through an OCR scan. Lots of fun stuff… like this one from page 283:
Subject: Re: [Fwd: RE: GISS Raw Data]
From: Gavin Schmidt
Date: 16 Aug 2007 21: 19:46 -0400
To: rruedy@giss.nasa.gov
McIntyre is an ass – almost goes without saying. But be careful not to start to take this personally. While it is clear that the most appropriate thing for him to do would be to code the methodology himself from the descriptions in the papers, he is unlikely to do so while he gets so much attention with the ‘NASA secret code’ meme. You are also correct in thinking that he will not be satisfied with the gridding code or the raw data set, and so inevitably a line needs to be drawn. However, where that line should be is debatable.
Did you examine what differences you get if you download the very latest USHCN dataset and use that instead of the one we got in 2000? If he does end up coding things himself he’ll see those differences easily, and it’s best if we know what they are first.
Gavin

Hi!
Me being a Swede, could someone explain to me the meaning of a mail from “Gavin” to “Rruedy” date 16 aug 2007, time 18:16:22
..It may still be worth putting a clean version of the adjustment program on the website in order to have something to point to..
Should there be a dirty version??

Kate (00:15:29)
“With “adjustments” they changed a 1.18ºC cooling to a 1.01ºC warming for the last 130 years. While they’re screaming about a supposedly scary global rise of 0.6ºC (sometimes said to be 0.7ºC or 0.8ºC) in the last 100 years they “adjust” this location upward by three times as much or more. As always, “adjustments” go only one way.”
It may well be the case that for this particular station ‘cooling has been turned into warming’ by virtue of the adjustments, but I’m afraid your statement that ‘As always, “adjustments” go only one way.”‘ is just plain wrong and is tanatmount to the sort of cherry picking advocacy statement that gives real skeptics who actually practice the scientific method (i.e seek to refute claims rather than re-enforce them) a bad name.
There are in fact several hundred stations in which the ‘cooling is turned to warming’ and conversely ‘warming is turned into cooling’ courtesy of the adjustments NOAA and GISS make to the raw data.
If you want to see the the full lists (for NOAA) go to the following thread on ‘Digging in the Clay’ and you can download the lists for yourself and then go and look where ever you want (href=”http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/”>GISS web site, Appinsys or use the interactive maps I’ve provided to confirm the absurdity of some of these adjustments.Physically unjustifiable NOAA GHCN adjustments
Note the above thread is about the NOAA adjustments and not the GISS adjustments (which are not quite as bad as the NOAA adjustments). I’ll be putting up an equivalent thread showing the ‘cooling turned to warming’ and ‘warming turned to cooling’ because of the GISS adjustments shortly.

Carrot eater-
Yes, I can download all the data and then spend alot of time trying to back calculate exactly what they did, instead of them telling me what they did – you know, showing your work like peer review requires.

Leif Svalgaard (23:10:37) : We fully expect SDO to further confirm the very successful standard solar models and provide us with a detailed view of the flows of plasma inside the gaseous Hydrogen Sun to aid us in prediction of solar activity.
Bets that SDO finds at least one new discovery that results in a change, big or small, to the current standard solar model? Come on Leif, lighten up. If we never challenged existing dogma we would never learn anything new. The scientific method explains how we should all play nicely on the playground. It is when people violate the scientific method, like when Gavin and James used selection bias to fudge the GHCN temperature data, that the wheels fall off the cart.
Mike Ramsey

I took the 4 PDF’s and ran them through Adobe OCR and saved them back. So What you get are the same 4 PDF files with everything in it but searchable and copyable.
You can get the file from here:http://fichierforum.iservio.ca/NASA_GISS_FOIA/
Hopefully it will not kill my bandwidth

carrot eater (21:47:10) :
““To observe that the warming accelerates would take even longer observation times” than the past 25 years. In fact, it would take “another 50-100 years.””
How is that statement alarmist or advocacy? Somebody asked if warming was accelerating, and he replied, no, you’d have to wait several more decades before you could observe acceleration. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how Horner is interpreting that statement to see alarmism or advocacy.
——————–
But were’nt NASA saying to the public that the warming was accelerating? If they were saying that in public, whilst in private they are saying it is impossible to draw that conclusion, then that would constitute advocacy.

1. Leif Svalgaard (23:10:37) :
“This is not a ‘new attitude’. Abbot showed a hundred years ago that the Sun was a variable star. And none of this has any bearing on your ideas, if anything SDO will provide solid refutation. We fully expect SDO to further confirm the very successful standard solar models and provide us with a detailed view of the flows of plasma inside the gaseous Hydrogen Sun to aid us in prediction of solar activity.”
2. Leif Svalgaard (22:14:26) quotes Oliver K. Manuel (21:11:10) :
“There is still a lot of filth to be revealed, including the blatantly false information that NASA and DOE have promoted on the origin, chemical composition, and source of nuclear energy for the Sun”
Leif replies: “The current knowledge of how the Sun works is the result of hard work by scientists all over the world. NASA, etc, has nothing to do with this. But since NASA did not renew your grant, . . . ”
Oliver replies: Running scared, Leif?
You’ve got a lot of company at NAS, NASA, DOE, etc.
The abrupt U-turn at NASA is clear by comparing David Hathaway’s comments in NASA’s latest news report with his comment that my work is “crackpot science’ in the UPI News, 17 July 2002 report by Dan Whipple,
“An Iron Sun: Groundbreaking or Cracked”, UPI News, 17 July 2002
Perhaps you and your friends could comfort each other as you prepare to change lifestyles. May I recommend the words of former President Harry Truman as a guide?
“I didn’t give’em hell. I just spoke the truth and they thought it was hell”
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
from Missouri, the home of
Former President Harry S.Truman

carrot eater (23:31:12) :
You said it yourself even better in
carrot eater (00:02:39) :
All the data used by GISS is publicly available. GISS does not collect it themselves; they get it from NOAA, SCAR and Hadley. You can download all those files yourself.
Yes, that is where the holes are.

Robert hissed, ‘Good luck with your witch hunt. Meanwhile, science goes on.’
When I was blaguing more frequently, I came to recognize blagueurs whose signature ‘contribution’ to the discussion was to inject a nasal snarkiness. I fancy utterances such as these as being spoken in the voice of Peter Lorre.
‘You despise me, don’t you Rick?’
‘If I thought about you, Ugati, I probably would.’

carrot eater (23:31:12) :
rbateman (22:02:56) :
“The sticking parts, as I see it, are the 50-100 years to see the trend confirmed,”
The current trend is significant over the last 30 years, so it’s already confirmed. That statement is about observing acceleration beyond the current rate. It’d take a long while to discern any acceleration.
The 30 year trend is called the PDO cycle, and I think we need at least 4-5 PDO cycles to see a long term, or ‘climate’, trend, ie. 120-150 years.

“Lucy Skywalker (23:57:36) :
These emails have been out for a little while. They are on Neutralpedia, having been put back into text files with OCR.
If you visit Neutralpedia and become curious, what this is, read this article”
LUCY: We have a climate A – Z here: http://www.hidethedecline.eu
You are very welcome to use anything (perhaps (with a little ref).
When making this site, I was actually thinking if there could be some kind of coorporation: Mail FEL@NNIT.COM

Not fully topic, but concerning GISTEMP January anomalies published recently. GISTEMP claims that arctic area 80N-90N was only about 0.7 degrees C colder than January 2009. But according to DMI data, January 2010 is at least 5 degrees C below January 2010! That is quite a big difference, and certainly needs further investigations.

A major problem with the world temperature stations is that they were never established to calculate a world temperage average. Temperature is of utmost importance at airports because temperature affects the density of the air and therefore the lift on the wings. A pilot needs this information to determine his speed and length of runway needed to take off. People in cities are interested in just how hot or cold it is where they are, not at some location miles away. When people at CRU, GISS and NCDC started calculating a global temperature, it does not appear that they were selective in what stations they used. Instead, they tried to overcome the problem with bad data with statistical majic. One method was to calculate an anomaly at each station relative to an average over a time period. They can show statistically how this gets rid of some of the station quality problems. It would be much better to select stations based on quality of the station itself and then not have to worry about all of the data manipulation. To restore confidence in the temperature system they need to provide the following:
1. Description of each station used similar to the surfacestations.org documentation.
2. Raw temperature data.
3. File of data with missing temperatures filled in.
4. Documentation of how missing temperatures are calculated.
5. File of adjusted data and documentation of how adjustments are made.
I have put up a copy of the IPCC AR4 Chapter 3, section 3.2 on temperatures along with links to the supporting peer-reviewed papers on my website:http://www.socratesparadox.com.
I have not read all of the papers yet, but what I have not found so far is any quality control or auditing of the actual measurment and collection process. All of the peer-review is of the theory.

Andrew Revkin, fearless AGW proponent from the NY Times, writes to Hansen, “i never, till today, visited http://www.surfacestations.org and found it quite amazing. if our stations are that shoddy, what’s it like in Mongolia?”
Don’t worry, Andy my boy. Surface Stations ain’t peer reviewed. Because you really need peer review to tell you that jamming a thermometer up the ass end of a ’44 Mercury coupe might affect the readings.

thethinkingman (02:51:07) :
A little OT and probably linked by others but . . .http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_agw_smoking_gun.html
———
Reply:
Ah, thinkingman, you’ve hit upon perhaps the actual bullet that kills AGW. From your referenced article they convincingly conclude:
“So the results of three different peer-reviewed papers show that over a period of 36 years, there is no reduction of OLR emissions in wavelengths that CO2 absorb. Therefore, the AGW hypothesis is disproven.”
In other words, AGW is dead. DEAD, I TELL YOU!
I strongly suggest everybody read and digest that article and see how and why they’ve come to their conclusion.

Alan the Brit (01:53:45) :
“I think the point is that that particular statement, was neither alarmist nor advocacy, yet NASA on the whole at the time of such a statement was at the forefront of alarmist AGW, lending more than a little hypocracy to the point being made! Horner is vindicated!”
Come again? The statement is neither alarmist nor advocacy, OK. I don’t follow where you go from there.
Henry (03:39:16) :
They (GISS) do tell you what they did. It’s described quite clearly in the publications. And if you don’t like that, they made the code public, too. What more do you need?
Do you at least acknowledge that the FOI was indeed asking for emails?

Leif Svalgaard (22:14:26) :
“……………… But since NASA did not renew your grant, perhaps it is not too surprising that you are disgruntled, but your are in good company with many others who also didn’t get funded [the result rate for proposals is less than 25%].”
Dr. Svalgaard
Money allocated for research, be it NASA or some other taxpayers financed institution, may or may not be plentiful, the science credentials of an applicant may or may not merit such grants, but in certain cases may be other non-financial, not scientific constraints for a grant allocation. It is not the God given right of anyone on the public purse, so past recipients should be grateful for funds already received !

Vincent (04:07:25) :
carrot eater (21:47:10) :
““To observe that the warming accelerates would take even longer observation times” than the past 25 years. In fact, it would take “another 50-100 years.””
How is that statement alarmist or advocacy? Somebody asked if warming was accelerating, and he replied, no, you’d have to wait several more decades before you could observe acceleration. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how Horner is interpreting that statement to see alarmism or advocacy.
——————–
But were’nt NASA saying to the public that the warming was accelerating? If they were saying that in public, whilst in private they are saying it is impossible to draw that conclusion, then that would constitute advocacy.
Thank you, Vincent, you put it better than I did.
AtB

Mike Ramsey (03:41:07) :If we never challenged existing dogma we would never learn anything new.
There is a big difference between dogma and a good scientific theory. The latter is good because of its explanatory power, but is always susceptible to improvement, as SDO will undoubtedly bring.
Oliver K. Manuel (04:09:05) :The abrupt U-turn at NASA is clear by comparing David Hathaway’s comments in NASA’s latest news report with his comment that my work is “crackpot science’
I’m sure that Hathaway and NASA and just about everybody else still categorize your work as crackpottery.
vukcevic (06:15:16) :the science credentials of an applicant may or may not merit such grants
Grants are usually not given based on credentials [although it helps to have some], but on the scientific merit of the specific proposal [as judged by other scientists – with all the problems inherent in that].

Anthony/Charles:
I assume from some of the posts that there is new information in this cache of documents compared to the documents obtained by JudicialWatch? It would be great if these could be archived in accessible forms at appropriate locations.

Leif Svalgaard (06:53:10) :
“Grants are usually not given based on credentials [although it helps to have some], but on the scientific merit of the specific proposal…”
May be so, wouldn’t know, never applied for public money, but I am sure some of my hard earned cash went to some grants somewhere, I hope to deserving people, and I mean it in the widest sense of the word.

Vincent (04:07:25) :
“But were’nt NASA saying to the public that the warming was accelerating? If they were saying that in public, whilst in private they are saying it is impossible to draw that conclusion, then that would constitute advocacy.”
This also isn’t making sense. They were speaking to a journalist, and telling that journalist you couldn’t observe acceleration yet. With the full knowledge that this was going to be the basis for the article she was writing. If they wanted the public message to be “yes, there is currently acceleration”, then they would have told the journalist to publish that.
Anyway, I do *not* think they were saying to the public that acceleration in temperature change was currently observable. They may have said it was possible by the end of the century, but that would be entirely consistent with what they told the journalist.
If you think they have publicly said anything otherwise, please provide a reference. Otherwise, I am left befuddled as to why this email shows alarmism, advocacy, or anything inappropriate.

Just to underline these words:Oliver K. Manuel (21:11:10) :
….There is still a lot of filth to be revealed, including the blatantly false information that NASA and DOE have promoted on the origin, chemical composition, and source of nuclear energy for the Sun – Earth’s ultimate source of heat.,
If revealed this will be a big step ahead for humanity.

@Robert (21:08:30) :
““My FOIA request asked NASA about their internal discussions regarding whether and how to correct the temperature error caught by McIntyre.””
“So . . . not data. Not models.
E-mails of internal discussions, hoping to find something embarrassing.
Good luck with your witch hunt. Meanwhile, science goes on.”
I see you have a problem with reading comprehension. He submitted two FOIA requests. This discussion is part one of two-parts. Can you guess what part two will be about?
Typical of AGW proponents to ignore what suits them.

@RockyRoad
Too bad their analysis is flawed. Little to rise in outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) does not debunk GW. Look at it like this – from all indications surface temperatures have gone up since 1970. CO2 has also increased since 1970. So if surface temperatures have increased (leading to an increase in OLR), and CO2 has increased (leading to more OLR absorption), then it might be possible that the increase of CO2 absorption has balanced with the increase in surface OLR emission.

Leif Svalgaard (06:53:10) : Mike Ramsey (03:41:07) : If we never challenged existing dogma we would never learn anything new. There is a big difference between dogma and a good scientific theory. The latter is good because of its explanatory power, but is always susceptible to improvement, as SDO will undoubtedly bring.
Can’t argue with that. I too am looking forward to what SDO discovers.
Mike Ramsey

Robert:
Since when is it science to finagle the data and not show your work? I would have been drummed out of my graduate program for anything half this egregious. What these scientists appear to have done is SO unscientific and unethical, and that is why I am so upset. (probably everybody else too, but I won’t speak for them.)

Quote: JonesII (07:36:47) : Just to underline these words:
Oliver K. Manuel (21:11:10) :
….There is still a lot of filth to be revealed, including the blatantly false information that NASA and DOE have promoted on the origin, chemical composition, and source of nuclear energy for the Sun – Earth’s ultimate source of heat.,
If revealed this will be a big step ahead for humanity.
– – – – – – – –
Thanks for the reminder, JonesII. You are exactly right.
To be more specific in the charges:
NASA continued to misrepresent the Sun as a ball of Hydrogen – the lightest element – after lunar samples showed that mass fractionation selectively moves lightweight elements and isotopes to the solar surface and into the solar wind:
a) Composition of Sun’s “surface”: http://www.omatumr.com/images/Fig1.htm
b) Mass separation observed in lunar samples:http://www.omatumr.com/Data/1983Data.htm
DOE helped to deceive the public by claiming that:
a) Solar neutrinos oscillate away, thus confirming NASA’s claim that the Sun is a ball of Hydrogen:
One hundred and seventy-eight (178) authors, “Direct evidence for neutrino flavor transformation from neutral-current interactions in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 (2002) 011301http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v89/i1/e011301
Two (2) authors, “Is there a deficit of solar neutrinos?”, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Neutrino Oscillations, Istituto Veneto di Scienze ed Arti, Venice, Italy.http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0410460v1
b) Neutron-neutron interactions are attractive although nuclear rest mass data clearly showed repulsive interactions between neutrons in all nuclei with two or more neutrons:
“Neutron repulsion confirmed as energy source”, Journal of Fusion Energy 20 (December 2001) pages 197-201http://www.omatumr.com/abstracts2003/jfe-neutronrep.pdfhttp://www.omatumr.com/Data/2000Data.htm
That is some of the filth that I personally observed in NASA’s and DOE’s portions of the present Climategate scandal.
Underlying the entire structure is an unholy alliance of politicians with the National Academy of Sciences – the agency that reviews budgets of various research agencies for Congress – to save the world from the foolishness of ordinary, tax-paying citizens.
With deep regret,
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space Studies
Former NASA PI for Apollo

From: r[email separator]shaw.ca
> Date: Fri, 10 Aug zu0/ 09:34:53 -0700
> To: Leslie.M.McCarthy[email separator]nasa.gov
> Subject: GISS – Truth driven vs agenda driven
Page 1 of 3
> Dear Leslie,
> My fellow Canadians have unveiled another Global warming scam
> yours!Now that we know Mr. Hansen used incorrect data or procedures in
determining the “hottest years”, concluding that the top 5 warmest
years since the 1890s are : 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006.
> Yet, there on your website
> (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/researchinews/20070208/) is the information
> still
> making what is now known to be a bogus claim. Yes we are at a tipping point all right. And the truth is spilling all
over your pro-AGW agenda.

Leif Svalgaard (06:53:10) to Oliver K. Manuel (04:09:05) :
“I’m sure that Hathaway and NASA and just about everybody else still categorize your work as crackpottery.”
Keep repeating that to yourself, Leif, and hope that your friends in high places will be able persuade the public.
One of us is definitely an excellent example of a bad example of science.
I am convinced that all of the influence of NAS, NASA and DOE cannot bend the truth forever, Leif, so let’s let history decide who.
That was the approach that the late Professor Glenn Seaborg and I took at the end of the 20th century in organizing a symposium on the “Origin of Elements in the Solar System: Implications of Post-1957 Observations”.
We assembled a blend of highly respected experimentalists and theorists from astronomy, geology, meteoritics, planetology and nuclear chemistry and physics to discuss the origin of elements in the solar system.
We tried to include all points of view and let history judge their validity.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel

carrot eater (07:34:04) :
Dear carrot eater,
I think the point you are missing (& I cannot see why that is just yet) is that NASA (Hansen) have been complicit in ratchet reporting, failing to challange alarmist claims about AGW in the msm where they have been misquoted or exaggeration has taken place, just as the Met Office & other organisations have done & still do, when they should be referring to what the science is allegedly telling us in a calm, scientific, considered way without resorting to scare stories. Any scientific body that lets alarmism run riot in the msm without due challenge to stick to actual science is complicit, simple as that. The hypocracy, is that NASA et al has & is alarmist in may ways on the one hand whilst at the same time claiming that alarmism is not good for the scientific debate on AGW, whatever that might be.

Steve Keohane (05:04:23) :
4-5 PDO cycles would be great. Which is why the back end of the the current USHCN is vital. We had a good enough run at it until the holders of the data ‘lost’ critical portions of it.

Alan the Brit (10:13:25) :
How can you say all that, when the example at hand is inconsistent with all that?
A journalist wanted to know if it’d be correct to say global warming is now accelerating, and GISS told them, no, you can’t say that because it isn’t.
This is an example of the person at GISS doing the right thing. So why is it being highlighted as a bad thing?

Matt (07:45:30) :
@RockyRoad
Too bad their analysis is flawed. Little to rise in outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) does not debunk GW. Look at it like this – from all indications surface temperatures have gone up since 1970. CO2 has also increased since 1970. So if surface temperatures have increased (leading to an increase in OLR), and CO2 has increased (leading to more OLR absorption), then it might be possible that the increase of CO2 absorption has balanced with the increase in surface OLR emission.
———–
Reply:
You might be onto something. I was hoping you’d say something like “analysis is flawed” because that opens up the whole CO2-absorption mythology.
Laboratory measurements show that carbon dioxide saturates (absorbs to extinction) at its main peak in 10 meters under atmospheric conditions. This means there is no radiation left at the peak frequencies after 10 meters. If then there is a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, the distance of adsorption reduces to half, or 5m. A reduction in distance is not an increase in temperature. Convectional currents stir the heat around removing any relevance for distance.
Scientists who promote the global warming hype try to work around this fact by claiming something different happens higher in the atmosphere, which they claim involves unsaturation on the shoulder of the absorption peaks. The difference due to height is that the adsorption peaks get smaller and sharper, so they separate from each other. Near the earth’s surface, the adsorption peaks for water vapor partially overlap the absorption peaks for CO2, while there is less water vapor high in the atmosphere. Supposedly, separating the peaks creates global warming. There is no credibility to that claim. It is nothing but an attempt to salvage global warming propaganda through fake rationalizing of complexities.
Pretending that radiation goes through the atmosphere at wavelengths absorbed by CO2 is the most basic fraud of climate alarmists.
For more, see: http://nov55.com/ntyg.html

@M. Simon (15:24:47) :
“It is not clear who the author of this piece is. You could try something like by Author. In periodical publishing these are called bylines.”
Well, this is a blog not a mag and the link given takes you to the original source by Chris Horner, who’s credited right at the beginning here too.

Oliver K. Manuel (09:25:37) :
Leif Svalgaard (06:53:10) wrt Oliver K. Manuel (04:09:05) :
>>>
Dr. Svalgaard – i’m sorry to have to say this, but I find some of your comments herein to be over the line and not professional. I’ve run into this a bit with you and can only say that a little humility might be in order…

I bet the guys at CRU are breathing a sigh of relief as the spotlight moves across the pond.
Do not feel left out Prof Jones etc, your not out of the woods yet.
What I have trouble with is Hansen/Gavin/ GISS, used to emphasized U.S. temperatures all along ranking individual years.
The emails then show them suddenly saying the exercise was simply not worthwhile when the numbers contradicted it (to much “noise) !
Must have been the noise of S.M./A.W and the C.E.I knocking on the door!
Keep up the great work you guys.

carrot eater (00:47:40) :
I see you bookmarked the Gilestro thread as a talking point. Perhaps you can comment on this statement he made, since as best as I can recall, neither he nor his fans ever admitted there might be a problem with it.

Not surprisingly, the distribution of adjustment trends2 is a quasi-normal3 distribution with peak pretty much around 0 (0 is the median adjustment and 0.017 C/decade is the average adjustment – the planet warming trend in the last century has been of about 0.2 C/decade).
And his analysis looks even more interesting if you blow it up a bit.http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/448/histogram.jpg

To those who might not be familar with Gilestro’s work, he claimed to show that adjustments are symmetric around zero, and his published histogram was very tightly squeezed so the distribution looked like a needle. Blowing up the figure shows the skewing.
He didn’t realize that even his analysis showed the adjustements accounted for 15% of the reported warming in the 20th century.

carrot eater (22:11:52) : f they just saved the GHCN and USHCN source files they used for each month, they could just recreate whichever calculation they ever did. Perhaps they should do that.
Nope. The programs and hardware (and compilers) too mutate over time. Such as the 15 Nov 2009 date when they swapped from USHCN to USHCN.v2 input (with USHCN.v2 being adjusted “warmer” than USHCN and with 1/10 F instead of the silly 1/100 F precision and with a boat load of individual data items changed) that required a change to the GHCN / USHCN merger code. Oh, and a “STEP6” was added. I’ve also demonstrated a compiler dependent bit of code that warms 1/10 of the records by 1/10 C in the F to C conversion. So depending on what compiler you use, you get different answers…
And if they FIXED that code, then you have a code change…
So it’s not enough just to save the input. You also need the code. And the compilers. And the hardware…
Or, of course, they could just have saved 45 MB of data (roughly) from each run… just about what would fit a few times over on a single “round tape” of the era. So they could have saved a bunch of the log files and intermediary files too. Cost was about $9 each IIRC.

Kate (00:15:29) : The latest independent analysis of world climate data by acclaimed skeptic blogger ‘Chiefio’ (aka E. M. Smith) and his blog contributors confirm that the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) has cynically dumped the world’s second oldest and reliable climate record at Prague in the Czech Republic for no scientific reason.
It is important to point out that while the thermometer was dropped as of January 2010 it can come back later, maybe. That is, it could be a Zombie Thermometer:http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/thermometer-zombie-walk/
And we get to wait a few weeks, or months, or maybe even a few years, to see the ultimate fate. (One thermometer in Canada came back after several years of being ‘walkabout’ so who knows how many “dead” thermometers are really just Zombies…)
This has the interesting side effect that some thermometers are constantly returning, but just a few months late. This might allow for the current month to always maintain a “delta” to prior months… Such an interesting tool the Zombie could be. (So much to analyze, so little time…)
So it’s possible that the oldest Czech thermometer might be dead, or it might “just be resting” for a while… A Zombie to walk the earth again, in just a few weeks… or months…Andrew30 (00:32:55) :
When Gavin Schmidt say something like this:
“The other factor might be that lampasas is overall cooling, if we use climatology to infill in recent years, that might give a warm bias. ”
Is this type of statement ’significant’?
Oh Yes!
One of the frequent spears thrown at me is the assertion that “the anomaly will save us” and that there is no way changing the composition of the thermometer inventory could possibly cause the anomaly map to change. yet here we have Gavin himself saying just that.
“Climatology” is the “Jargon” used to differentiate the Climatology Anomaly Method of “homgenizing” and “in fill” from the other methods. So you have First Difference as one approach “Climatology” as the other. (I have a reference to a paper somewhere…)
Ah, here it is:http://homepage.mac.com/williseschenbach/.Public/peterson_first_difference_method.pdf
It also tossed a couple of rocks at The Reference Station Method used in GIStemp ( GIStemp does some RSM and some CAM when it does offsets and anomalies so it gets the worst of both worlds, IMHO).
Worth a read to figure out the jargon of things like “climatology” if nothing else…
This statement amounts to an admission that GIStemp certainly IS sensitive to using ‘Fill In’ for missing stations via the “Climatology” (i.e. Anomaly and Reference Station Method) technique and means that “thermometer change matters”.
You have no idea how happy that one email makes me 😉
PS. It makes me think that ‘climatology’ as some kind of spice to warm up a meal, or a trick for adding a warm bias to data?
Am I mistaken?
Nope.
The only question is this: Given that they clearly KNEW it could be done, did they do it as a voluntary act or as an accident (via ignoring it)? Sin of omission or commission? Well; and maybe the follow on question of “If voluntary, was it done with intent?”.
But that they knew a bias could be introduced is clear. Only in doubt is what was done with this knowing.

John M (18:27:00) :
First off, the contention here was that adjustments only ever go one way. This is clearly not the case; the distribution is very nearly symmetric. Hard to imagine that homogenisation is some sort of intentional manipulation, with a distribution like that.
Yes, the mean is not exactly zero. This was noted and discussed, despite your assertion. The mean is small enough that one would not expect it to make much difference. And indeed, it does not.
See here. Look at the two graphs under Q4. Global average using raw and adjusted.http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/temperature-monitoring.html
Of course, even if it did show some difference, that’d be fine if the adjustments were justifiable. But as it is, the difference due to adjustment is negligible.
Note that these are global data.

John M (18:30:33) :
“He didn’t realize that even his analysis showed the adjustements accounted for 15% of the reported warming in the 20th century.”
You don’t have sufficient information there to determine that.
But once you make the global mean plot, you can see the difference. No such 15%. See the plot at NOAA.

E.M.Smith (19:37:55) :
Yes, yes. They’d have to archive the code, as well. That’s something they should do anyway; I don’t know if they do. Or they could have archived all the results. But they didn’t.
E.M.Smith (20:16:07) :
“This might allow for the current month to always maintain a “delta” to prior months… Such an interesting tool the Zombie could be.”
That really doesn’t make much sense. Whatever change there is when those stations get added, it catches up to you when they are added. So the trend map at any given point in time would be unaffected, so long as you ended your trend about 1 year before the current time. It’s the trends that matter.
Adding stations will have some impact, yes. If you add them to an undersampled part of the world, it will have more impact than adding them to an oversampled part. But you can sit there and watch how much each month’s anomaly (and more importantly, the trend) changes as those stations get updated over time.
“One of the frequent spears thrown at me is the assertion that “the anomaly will save us” and that there is no way changing the composition of the thermometer inventory could possibly cause the anomaly map to change.”
That is untrue, or at least, if anybody throws that spear at you, it is an untrue spear. The point everybody is making is that simply removing a station in a cold place will not make the record warmer. That much is very true, and is directly aimed at points you have made. On the other hand, removing a station that had different trends from its near neighbors will make a difference. To the extent that no two stations are 100% perfectly correlated, removing or adding a station will always have at least a tiny effect at that grid point.
“This statement amounts to an admission that GIStemp certainly IS sensitive to using ‘Fill In’ for missing stations via the “Climatology””
FILNET had a very slight impact for the US. That was never hidden. But for certain individual stations, it could make a big impact. Perhaps at this station, it was doing something unreasonable (if in fact it’s FILNET they’re talking about, I can’t tell)
“(i.e. Anomaly and Reference Station Method) technique and means that “thermometer change matters”.”
You’re mixing things up here. Of course things like FILNET and homogenisation matter; otherwise you wouldn’t bother doing them. Though in the end, the net impact is small compared to the trends.
And yes, thermometer change matters for the reasons I outlined above. That was never under dispute. It was the idea that simply removing high latitude/high altitude stations causes warming because they are cold – it’s that idea that’s heavily disputed, because it doesn’t make any sense when you use anomalies.

RockyRoad (10:53:28) :
You might be onto something. I was hoping you’d say something like “analysis is flawed” because that opens up the whole CO2-absorption mythology.
Unfortunately your source for this is flawed, and is wrong on the physics of emission of radiation by gases.

RichieP (16:33:49) :,
I was blogging this and wanted to give the author credit. Instead of just saying Author. The reason for bylines is to make that easy. And Anthony a while back said he was going to do that.
And exactly how was I to know that a link at the bottom of the piece was to the original? Well you got the link love anyway. I credited the piece to Author.

carrot eater (20:52:56) : And yes, thermometer change matters for the reasons I outlined above. That was never under dispute. It was the idea that simply removing high latitude/high altitude stations causes warming because they are cold – it’s that idea that’s heavily disputed, because it doesn’t make any sense when you use anomalies.
Such magnificent singing and dancing. Yet another example of “once shown to be” a roundly “disputed” problem becomes “always known”… Priceless.
Jones must be giving “of course the MWP existed” and “We knew the hockey stick was wrong” lessons 😉
BTW, I can explain EXACTLY why and how “high altitude” and “high latitude” station deletions / drops do, in fact, cause a warming influence. It is only your understanding of it that “doesn’t make any sense”. It all comes down to the way anomalies are used and a neat little overlooked temperature artifact / behaviour. Once you allow anomalies to be “basket of thermometers A” vs “basket of thermometers B” at a different time, all sorts of “unexpected side effects” can leak through.
If you actually think about it for a few months, you too can figure it out. If you chose to assume “it can’t be” you never will.
I’m ‘kicking the idea’ around with some (few, limited) folks with an eye to what to do with it… so no more will be posted on that point. For now it must stay a “teaser”.

Why, you have to wonder, are NASA, GISS, CRU et al all SOOOOO frightened of historic temperature data (see Kate’s blog above)..?
You don’t think it could be because it shows zero to negligible warming over two or three centuries, do you..?
Nah – that’s just a cynical skeptics view…

E.M.Smith (00:14:58) :
“Yet another example of “once shown to be” a roundly “disputed” problem becomes “always known”… Priceless. ”
____
Ever since 1987, at least, GISS has been calculating error bars due to incomplete spatial coverage. So yes, I do think the issue of incomplete spatial coverage has been known for a while. I don’t know how much more clearly to put that.
They also, in that 1987 paper, examined other ways of combining the stations, as well as decided to drop stations with less than 20 years of overlap with the neighbors. They admitted that in their method, the results could vary slightly if they used a different station as the first one into the basket. So they’ve known the method of calculation has some impact on the results.
___
“BTW, I can explain EXACTLY why and how “high altitude” and “high latitude” station deletions / drops do, in fact, cause a warming influence. It is only your understanding of it that “doesn’t make any sense”. It all comes down to the way anomalies are used and a neat little overlooked temperature artifact / behaviour. Once you allow anomalies to be “basket of thermometers A” vs “basket of thermometers B” at a different time, all sorts of “unexpected side effects” can leak through.”
___
Each station is added to the ‘basket’ after adding or subtracting an offset. Once you do that, there is no memory of whether it was a hot or a cold station. Only whether it was warming or cooling. Now, this could get dicey if the periods of overlap are not long enough to calculate the proper offset (especially if the stations don’t correlate well with each other), which is why they exclude those with too little overlap.

carrot eater (10:37:27) :
Alan the Brit (10:13:25) :
How can you say all that, when the example at hand is inconsistent with all that?
A journalist wanted to know if it’d be correct to say global warming is now accelerating, and GISS told them, no, you can’t say that because it isn’t.
This is an example of the person at GISS doing the right thing. So why is it being highlighted as a bad thing?
My final word on the subject in this post. Telling the truth is ALWAYS the right policy in the end, although I would concede that the truth is open to interpretation in many cases. Yes he said the right thing, but if he or his colleagues said something different in public then that is politics, pure & simple, & politicians are always looking for a cause célèbre & a soap box from which to shout it.
HAGWE carrot eater, & the same to everyone else in Blogistan! :-))

Alan the Brit (02:15:07) :
Have your last word, but it seems to me that you allow there is nothing wrong with this email.
“but if he or his colleagues said something different in public”
IF they ever said that the temperature trend was currently observed to be accelerating, then that would be wrong. Have they ever done so? Seems a little unfair to just leave that hypothetical out there, as if they might have done. People have maybe talked about possible acceleration in other things, but I’m not aware of GISS people specifically claiming a current acceleration in temperature.

First off, the contention here was that adjustments only ever go one way.

Point taken. But I merely pointed out what gg claimed and asked what you thought of it. I also pointed out that the distribution was not symmetrical and that stretching the graph out helped to visualize that point. Do you dispute that?

“He didn’t realize that even his analysis showed the adjustements accounted for 15% of the reported warming in the 20th century.”
You don’t have sufficient information there to determine that.

What is there not enough information for?
That gg says the average adjustment average is 0.017deg/decade?
That he erroniously says that warming from 1900-2000 was 0.2 deg/decade?
That the actual warming from 1900-2000 was .065 deg/decade?http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1900/to:2000/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1900/to:2000/trend:2000/plot/none
That 0.017/.065 x 100% is 15%? (well, actually, you’ve got me there, it’s 26%)
That he didn’t understand his error wrt to 0.2 deg/decade, even after having it pointed out to him at least twice?
What information do we lack?
If the NOAA analysis shows the adjustments are much smaller than that, take it up with gg, not me.
But as long as you mention the NOAA analysis, where are their results for 1900-2000?

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